Books line the shelves at the new Rizzoli flagship bookstore in New York. AP

Yesterday, I bought a book — at a bookshop that closed 16 months ago.

When a developer kicked Rizzoli Bookstore out of the 57th Street town house it had rented for nearly 30 years so that it could build yet another skinny supertower, people saw it as another sign of Vanishing New York.

But Rizzoli is back, 30 blocks south, and is giving New Yorkers a different lesson. If you’ve got to change or die, sometimes it’s better to opt for the former.

Rizzoli, famed for its art books and foreign fashion magazines, opened its new space yesterday at Broadway and 26th Street, across from Madison Square Park.

The store’s owners looked at 100 spaces before choosing this landmark — a real landmark, meaning nobody can tear it down.

Rizzoli has brought the character of its old space to the new one, outfitting the 1896 Beaux-Arts building with tables and chandeliers from the old store, and commissioning a sky-scape mural to run along the 18-foot ceilings.

Two of the new space’s three huge rooms were still under construction as customers browsed, but, said store manager Chad Bunning, “We wanted to open something today.” The store’s staff of 15, including Bunning, is brand new, a testament to how long a year and a half can be.

Chris Pangborn, one new staffer, worked for the Shakespeare Co. bookstores in the Village and the Upper East Side for 20 years, before one closed and the other one changed hands. When Pangborn first moved to the city in 1989, he lived in Rizzoli’s new NoMad neighborhood, when it was “dodgy.”

But in the past few years, he notes, “since they had the pedestrian zone, it’s been really pleasant. There’s a younger vibe, definitely.”

As Rizzoli helps to change its new neighborhood, it is changing itself, too. “We’re now a modern interpretation of an independent bookstore,” says Bunning. “We want to be a cultural hub.”

Rizzoli will still reign in art and fashion. But it’ll offer more to locals who still browse, too, with a fiction selection ranging from “To Kill a Mockingbird” to translated European mysteries.

Tourists, too, will be able to have an experience; Bunning notes that Paris’ Shakespeare Co. bookstore stamps people’s purchases so that they have a readable souvenir, and Rizzoli is considering something along those lines.

The new shop will also serve people who might just want to drop in and buy the latest “it” memoir or a top business title.

Rizzoli will concentrate more, too, on cocktail parties and corporate events. “I’d like to see Marc Jacobs do a runway show,” says Bunning.

Film scouts, too, likely will want the space, to make movies that encourage global tourists to come to New York to visit its remaining bookstores.

The new Rizzoli also has its new windows. Vogue man-about-town André Leon Talley has outfitted them with a confection of Vivienne Westwood, Gucci and Manolo Blahnik clothes and shoes, surrounded by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons art books (and, yes, the Ta-Nehisi Coates memoir on race that all the cool people are talking about).

And Rizzoli still has its loyal customers. John Gaynor came in from Bayonne for opening day. “I love Rizzoli,” Gaynor, an art-book collector and general bibliophile, notes. He used to visit Rizzoli and other bookstores along Fifth Avenue and 57th Street before attending the opera.

“I think it will be a success,” he notes, partly because “it’s important to the fashion people” a few blocks north. Not everyone wants to read on a screen.

Gaynor is such a good customer that he remembers the old, old Rizzoli.
Before 57th Street, the original store was on Fifth and 56th and lost its space to . . . a real-estate developer who wanted to tear it down.

And what happened to that old building? The city landmarked it — forcing the developers to build above and around it. The historic space is now Henri Bendel.

No such luck for the 57th Street spot, which, as the pro-supertall-tower blog YIMBY triumphantly noted three months ago, is now “completely demolished.”

Good thing we’ve got some old buildings left, though, for our small businesses to adapt and thrive in.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.